Department of Decision Sciences

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 57
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    A juggler's manifesto: elevating creativity to stay productive amid uncertainty
    (2023) Enstroem, Rickard; Schmaltz, Rodney
    Purpose The Industry 4.0 environment is characterized by fast data, vertically and horizontally interconnected systems, and human–machine interfaces. In the middle stands the manager, whose sustained performance is critical to the organization's success. Business disturbances—such as supply chain disruptions during the pandemic—can quickly test the manager's resiliency. While creativity and flexibility are critical for success in these situations, these skills are often not promoted directly. This paper will discuss strategies for enhancing managers' creativity and resiliency and give suggestions for improving professional development training and post-secondary business education. Design/methodology/approach A synthesis of the literature in business and psychology provides a foundation for creating a conceptual model incorporating strategies to promote managerial creativity and resiliency. While the model focuses on managerial performance under adverse conditions, the tenets of the model also apply during times of relative stability. Findings Findings based on a synthesis of the literature on creativity in business and psychology provide the foundation for a conceptual model to identify potential elements in training and curriculum design to further managers' creativity and resiliency. This model recommends clear, actionable training and program-level curriculum design suggestions for improved managerial performance. Originality/value This paper identifies a conceptual model to enhance managerial creativity leading to increased resiliency through professional development programs and suggestions for educators in post-secondary business education. This model provides tools for managers to deal with adverse and rapidly changing conditions flexibly, promoting employee productivity and satisfaction.
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    A game-theoretic analysis of Canada’s entry for LNG exports in the Asia-Pacific market
    (2023) Ghosh, Subhadip; Islam, Shahidul
    The import demand for energy resources, including liquefied natural gas (LNG), has been steadily increasing in the Asia-Pacific region. Australia, the Middle East (Qatar), the Russian Federation, and the U.S. are the major players who compete strategically to capture this ever-growing market for LNG. The objective of this paper is to examine the potential for Canada’s entry into this market as another LNG exporter and what impact that can have on the existing suppliers. Using a game-theoretic LNG export competition model, we explore the conditions under which Canada can make a profitable entry. We also investigate the effect of Canada’s entry on the profitability of the four incumbent exporters. Employing a multi-leader Stackelberg model, we found that Canada’s entry could be a Pareto superior outcome under certain conditions because it benefits all competing firms and consumers. Further, Canada’s entry into the LNG export market always helps the low-cost incumbent firms by increasing their output and profit. However, the high-cost incumbent firms’ output falls, while their profit may increase or decrease depending on the unit cost and market size parameters. With differential export costs between Canada and the U.S., the latter has an incentive to act strategically to affect the entrance of the former.
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    Energy infrastructure in India: challenges and opportunities
    (2022) Majumder, Rajarshi; Ghosh, Subhadip; Chatterjee, Bidisha
    Productivity is the new buzzword for economic growth in the era of globalization, as countries with higher productivity levels enjoy a comparative advantage over their competitors. Infrastructure is critical in this quest for higher productivity, growth, and development, and energy infrastructure is one of its crucial components. Longterm planning for ensuring that energy demands are met has become an integral part of policy-making, as energy infrastructure requires a huge lump sum investment and has a long gestation period. So, capacity augmentation and installing energy infrastructure in its physical form (refineries, power plants, pipelines, distribution lines, and so on) have to be planned and executed early. In this paper, we first narrate India’s energy demand/consumption trends over the last four decades and then try to forecast future energy demands and related energy infrastructure needs over the medium to long run period of 20 years from 2020 to 2040. Total Primary Energy Consumption is expected to be more than double the current level, and electricity demand to treble. As a result, coal production, oil refining, gas importing and distribution, electricity generation, and transmission & distribution capacities all have to grow substantially. Thus, we are looking at massive infrastructure requirements for the energy production sector. Finally, policy implications are also discussed.
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    Cash assist or shark loan? In quest of doing well while doing good
    (2022) Taleb, Ali; Ghosh, Subhadip
    Jim Kamal, 24 years, was a socially-conscious entrepreneur at hart. He just completed his undergrad studies in Accounting and was exploring the opportunity of starting a Payday Loan business. While doing market research, he came across various information that made his decision difficult. On the one hand, the opportunity appeared to have great potential for superior return on investment. On the other hand, the industry clearly suffered from a bad image due to what the press and government representatives qualified as unethical commercial practices. This was in contradiction with Kamal's personal values and professional objective - doing good while doing well.
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    Clone resistant mutual authentication for low-cost RFID and contactless credit cards
    (2007) Lemieux, Stephane; Tang, Adrian
    With Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags being used to secure contactless credit cards, great benefits but also serious security and information privacy issues have arisen. Recently many attempts have been made to resolve these issues. In particular, attempts have been made to provide a means for authentication between tag and reader. However, none have yet have been able to provide resistance to cloning attacks. Furthermore, authentication on lowest range of low-cost RFID tags, also remains a challenge. We propose a clone resistant, mutual authentication scheme that requires only 32 bits of read write memory, 90 bits of read only memory and can be deployed using as few as 300 logic gates. We also propose a stream cipher with the same memory constraints and magnitude of logic gates. These systems may also be scaled to provide a high level of security, using relatively little computational resources, on larger hardware platforms.